Agent Rules Books 🧩 Skill Open source
Agent rules and skills distilled from Clean Code, Refactoring, DDD and other classic books
- GitHub stars
- 2.9k
- Stars this week
- +32
- Forks
- 508
- Licence
- MIT
- Last push
- 2026-09-10
- Maintainer
- ciembor
npx skills add ciembor/agent-rules-books --allThird-party agent skills run with your permissions. Read the source before installing, and prefer pinned versions.
Works with
Built on the open Agent Skills standard, so it works in every app that supports Agent Skills.
DSCODEAbout Agent Rules Books
What it does
Agent Rules Books, by Maciej Ciemborowicz, turns the ideas of well-known software engineering books into rule sets that a coding agent can follow. Instead of telling an agent to "follow Clean Code", you give it a concrete list of practices drawn from that book. The rules are the author's own wording, not quotes from the books, and they are not official material from the authors or publishers.
What is inside
The repository has fourteen rule sets. Each one lives in its own folder with a standard SKILL.md entry point:
- Design and code quality: A Philosophy of Software Design, Clean Code, Code Complete, The Pragmatic Programmer
- Architecture: Clean Architecture, Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, Designing Data-Intensive Applications
- Domain-Driven Design: the original book, DDD Distilled and Implementing DDD
- Change and reliability: Refactoring, Refactoring.Guru, Working Effectively with Legacy Code, Release It!
Every rule set comes in three sizes. mini is the recommended default, nano suits tight context budgets, and full is the complete reference. The skill loads the mini version and keeps the full file for deeper lookups. Separate guides cover how to combine books and how the rules were extracted.
Works with
The README targets Claude Code, Codex and Cursor. It also describes pasting the rules into AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, Cursor rules or Copilot custom instructions. Because each book ships a SKILL.md, any agent that supports Agent Skills can load it.
How to install
npx skills add ciembor/agent-rules-books --all
npx skills add ciembor/agent-rules-books --skill refactoringMaintenance and safety
MIT licensed and actively updated, with a changelog and versioned releases. The content is plain Markdown with no scripts, so it cannot execute anything. The author ran one small experiment comparing a refactor with and without the rules, and calls the result an early signal rather than a benchmark.
Who should use it
Developers who want an agent to refactor or design code according to a specific school of thought, especially on legacy or domain-heavy projects. Pick one or two books that match your codebase rather than loading them all.
Pros
- Fourteen rule sets in mini, nano and full sizes to fit any context budget
- Plain Markdown with a SKILL.md per book, no scripts to run
Cons
- Rules are one author's interpretation, not official book material; evidence of benefit is a single informal experiment
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